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Fyrius's avatar

Who in their right mind bothers to DDoS Fluther?

Asked by Fyrius (14583points) January 13th, 2010

Genuine question, not a rhetorical one.

“Fluther’s hosting provider is under a massive DDoS attack. It’s affecting Fluther’s connectivity.”

Unless something I don’t get is going on here, this means we have a bunch of trolls going out of their way to annoy Fluther.
I’m curious. Who would do that, and why? This is a generally level-headed place. I could think of at least three sites at the drop of a hat that would be a lot more fun to troll and have it coming to boot.

What gives?

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18 Answers

Grisaille's avatar

We weren’t the target.

(via Tim)

nebule's avatar

they won’t just be targeting Fluther will they? presuming that the host, hosts other sites too???

erichw1504's avatar

An angry ex-flutherite whose questions kept getting pulled because he didn’t know how to write a real one on Fluther.

mamartinek's avatar

I am curious about the identity of Fluther’s hosting provider. Great tiiming for me, I just found your site!! I wonder how many other sites I enjoy are being attacked?

richardhenry's avatar

Fluther is hosted by Slicehost on 8 VPS boxes (last time I asked?).

Fluther wasn’t the target of the attack.

timtrueman's avatar

As everyone has said before we weren’t the target of the attack. We use a hosting provider called Slicehost that is home to many different servers hosting tons of different sites. Another website was under a distributed denial of service attack that took out out the whole network for an entire datacenter (which hosts hundreds of servers). We were just collateral damage.

Just in case this isn’t clear, everything kept running uninterrupted it was just that no one could get to Fluther’s servers from outside the datacenter. No data was lost or damaged or stolen. Things should be back to normal now.

stranger_in_a_strange_land's avatar

So we’re just “collateral damage”? I couldn’t believe anyone would attack a quiet, polite little community like ours.

stranger_in_a_strange_land's avatar

A DDoS attack is flooding the server with inputs? I’m an ignoramus on computer matters.

timtrueman's avatar

This is what a datacenter looks like (in this case it’s a Yahoo! datacenter). It’s a building optimized for redundant power, cooling and network connectivity. Thousands of servers (computers optimized for serving data) are hosted in a single facility. Fluther is one of many, many websites hosted in Slicehost’s STL-A datacenter. Another website in the datacenter came under a massive attack that flooded and saturated all the network connections in and out of the whole datacenter. Thus we were just collateral damage.

daemonelson's avatar

Assuming fluther is the target (which, as we’ve been informed, it isn’t), it would possibly be someone who gets moderated a lot.

The types with:

OMG THIS QUESTION IS SO FUCKING STUPID, YOUR GAY.

Or:

ZOMGROFLOLWAFFLEROFLBUNNIES!!!!11!!!!!one!!!!

And a myriad of other ridiculous answers that I sometimes see in the split second before being moderated into their rightful place. Oblivion.

Fyrius's avatar

@Grisaille
@lynneblundell
@richardhenry
@everyone else who gave the answer
I see, I see. So there was something I didn’t get going on after all.
Merci.

daemonelson's avatar

A tad confuddling. I just got my answer removed for describing the kinds of answers people who might DDoS fluther would give. And I also mentioned that the attacks weren’t specifically directed at fluther. Didn’t see what I did wrong there. It was quite clearly stated.

augustlan's avatar

@daemonelson It appears your answer was removed by mistake. By the time I saw this thread, it had already been restored.

filmfann's avatar

It was probably somebody who spouts random stuff, like “bag of dicks”.

daemonelson's avatar

@augustlan Yes, I heard through a comment. Thanks anyway : )

richardhenry's avatar

@daemonelson Ha! Those people generally don’t have access to a botnet, or the like.

daemonelson's avatar

@richardhenry Yes, I do sometimes wonder how such individuals could ever manage to hack without making thousands of syntax erros.

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